Forget Your [In]Glorious Past and Focus on Your Present Value

Rational businesses don’t care about what you’ve done in the past; they care about the value you can produce now.

Past Credentials Fade

Your formal education naturally decays over time. You’ll forget much of the hard material within a decade of graduation. While completing a complex academic program signals intelligence, persistence, or other traits, those qualities can fade and may no longer apply to the present. Relying on measurements from your past self leads to overestimating your current value.

For example, maybe you’ve had too many beers, suffered a concussion, or simply aged. Any number of factors could make you different from your younger self.

Conversely, if you haven’t achieved much in the past, you might compare yourself to peers with fancier resumes and undervalue your current potential. Your C- in Trigonometry doesn’t mean you’re inherently less capable. Relying too heavily on past failures can cause you to sell yourself short.

The same irrelevancy applies to other signals like portfolios, resumes, testimonials, or recommendations. These are merely records of past achievements, not necessarily indicators of your present value.

Value Is Contextual

Your value isn’t just the sum of your capacities—it’s about how you interact with the business environment. Companies exist to solve problems for profit. You’re valuable to the extent that you help companies solve those problems effectively.

Each professional situation presents its own challenges: the business problem, deadlines, team dynamics, technical complexity, and more. Your skills, passion, or curiosity only matter to the degree they solve the immediate problem.

For example, some software projects may need more leadership than technical expertise. If you’re a talented programmer but unpracticed in leadership, you may bring more harm than good if placed in the wrong role. In other cases, a conscientious junior engineer may add more value by organizing, documenting, and communicating effectively, even if they lack deep technical skills.

Status vs. Results

One reason people struggle to gauge their value is that we often rely on social feedback or career ranks to define ourselves. It feels good to hold a certain title or position, and we cling to it. But professional titles can be misleading.

Linear career progressions (Jr, Mid, Sr, Staff, VP) give a sense of status, but they’re not always reflective of actual ability. Junior developers sometimes outperform Staff engineers, and titles don’t capture the real contributions to a project or company.

Measuring Your Value

The key question is: Do your actions improve the effectiveness of your team, project, or company? If you can’t answer with an enthusiastic “Yes!” there’s a good chance you’re delivering fuzzy value—putting in effort without a clear direction or purpose.

A quick anecdote: the most valuable work I’ve done in the past wasn’t even in my area of expertise.

At one company, I reduced onboarding time from 30 days to 2 by setting up cloneable cloud VMs. I optimized compile times from 2 minutes to 20 seconds by using streams more effectively. I taught the DevOps and QA teams how to use Docker for automated testing pipelines, improving the entire deployment process.

None of these contributions were part of my formal job description, and they weren’t tracked by project managers. Yet, they had a huge impact on the company.

The takeaway? Your backstory, your ego, and the effort you’ve put in don’t matter. In the business world, looking for a “just reward” for effort or grunt work is a trap. Often, good outcomes come from luck, opportunistic experimentation, or a combination of factors beyond your control.

Let Go of Self-Perception

To remain adaptable, you have to let go of rigid self-perceptions and any outdated models of the world. One major cognitive trap is the Just-World Fallacy—the belief that hard work, morality, or intelligence guarantees success. In reality, it’s those who adapt who thrive, not necessarily the smartest or hardest-working.

I’ve encountered many older engineers frustrated by the rapid pace of change. Some resist taking advice from younger peers, while others refuse to embrace new technology trends. The tech industry’s reliance on fluid intelligence and working memory can also put them at a disadvantage.

In my own experience, I’ve noticed my openness to new things declining over time. To keep myself relevant, I occasionally go through merit-based hiring processes (instead of relying on referrals). This helps me gauge my current value and whether I’m still in demand.

It’s Not Personal

In certain industries, people capitalize on physical or cognitive “unfair advantages” while they last. Models and performers, for example, must continually re-market themselves as their looks fade. An outdated portfolio or a 25-year-old headshot isn’t going to land new gigs.

The same logic applies to knowledge workers. We often assume that our cognitive peak from early adulthood continues indefinitely, but that’s rarely true. The challenge is to renew your value continuously, not rest on past achievements.

Approach work situations with a blank slate. Your past, no matter how glorious or inglorious, is irrelevant to the value you can offer right now.